Anita Houck, Saint Mary’s College, enriches her teaching with skills she learned from Improv. She always addresses students’ questions with a “Yes” before nudging them beyond their scope of inquiry. She is a humorist who meets students where they are and, then, tickles them into a deeper sense of the subject and, perhaps, themselves. She is a recipient of the institution’s prestigious Maria Pieta Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2004 and the College Theology Society's Monika Hellwig Award for Teaching Excellence in 2017.
This podcast was taken from the video series, "The “I” That Teaches," a project that invites senior scholars to talk about their teaching lives. These scholar-teachers candidly discuss how religious, educational, and family backgrounds inform their vocational commitments and, also, characterize their teaching persona. From the vantage point of a practiced teaching philosophy we get an intimate account of the value and art of teaching well.